Remember the Silicon Valley made-for-Hollywood tale of Theranos? Since 2015, we've known that the blood testing startup was built on a shaky foundation. But it has taken until March 2018 for the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to charge its top executives with fraud.

The Wall Street Journal, which broke the Theranos story in October 2015, reported that today the SEC "charged Theranos Inc. Chief Executive Elizabeth Holmes with fraud and forced the company’s founder to give up control of the company."

More specifically,

The SEC accused Ms. Holmes, the company and former President Ramesh ‘’Sunny’’ Balwani of raising more than $700 million from investors through a years-long fraud that included making false statements about the company’s technology, business and financial performance. Under an agreement with the agency, Ms. Holmes has given up majority voting control over the company and reduced her equity stake.

In case you missed them, here's a CNN timeline of some of the key events in the Theranos story since 2014.

After the Journal broke the story in 2015, I wrote about Theranos's compelling narrative arc and was contacted by a source who had known Holmes since she was a child. He told me a series of even more shocking stories about her and the company which I could not verify. (One detail I could report is that her father, Christian Holmes, had been an Enron executive.)

He also introduced me to Theranos investors and advisors who in November 2015 enabled me to report on a December 2013 shareholder letter that made it clear just how much control Holmes had over the company.

In the December 2013 letter, Theranos asked investors to consent to a 5-to-1 forward stock split of its Series C-1 preferred stock which would lower its price/share from $75 per share to $15 per share.

The letter, titled “Theranos Stockholder Consents for your Signature by this Wednesday 12/18/13,” also asked shareholders to agree to create two classes of common stock that would protect Holmes' voting control of Theranos.

“Class A Common Stock [would receive] 1 vote per share and Class B Common Stock [holders would get] 100 votes per share, with all of the Class A Common Stock held by Theranos’ founder and beneficial owner of a majority of our capital stock, Elizabeth Holmes, being exchanged for Class B Common Stock,” the letter stated.

In November 2015, I interviewed a Theranos shareholder who told me that the company claimed the forward stock split had passed by unanimous consent but that she had never consented. Nor, this shareholder said, had she seen any information about the company's performance and prospects.